A traditional decorative element for expensive embroidered luxury textile materials is constituted by a suitable fabric substrate having small glass tubes, known as bugle beads, finely stitched thereon. Conventionally, the very small bugle beads are directly stitched on to the fabric substrate either by means of complicated hand work, or the fine bulge beads, which have previously been strung up on a thread, are stitched on to the supporting textile material in a time-consuming manner using a single-head Lorraine sewing machine. This makes the final product, which is a composite of the decorative bead materials and the textile substrate, expensive and labor intensive due, in particular, to the required hand work.
The problem occasioned by this state of the art is to provide a method by means of which, in a simple and largely mechanical manner, bugle bead-like decorative elements with a very high esthetic effect can be created. In particular, the improvement of this invention permits and encourages the use of existing mechanical means and knowledge in the field, so that the method of manufacturing such materials can be easily accomplished and widely disseminated, and therefore is not bound to special machines which must be acquired beforehand.
Since 1966 certain sequin units have been available, which are used on automatic Schiffli embroidery machines. Since that time, these units and machines have become used throughout the world. In all these sequin supply units, pre-punched narrow films are brought, by fine advance cam wheels, upstream of the needles of the Schiffli embroidery machine. Following the first needle penetration through these films, the sequins are separated from the film by a cutting knife, which is synchronously associated with the multiple advance units, and are then embroidered onto the base textile material as individual sequins. This has become a standard commercial procedure for applying sequin embroidery.